After we shook off the shackles of dictatorship in our anti-communist revolutions in 1989 and 1990, we was hoping that the historic justice that used to be accomplished to the Nazis after Global Battle II could be performed in opposition to the Soviets, too. We have been disillusioned. The arena lacked the braveness and honour to near the technology of socialism by way of exposing and condemning its crimes. It took greater than two decades after the regime trade for our area to take the initiative to in spite of everything pay tribute to the sufferers of totalitarian dictatorships on an afternoon of remembrance within the Eu Union beginning in 2011.
August 23 reminds us of the handshakes of 2 dictators and the anti-human regimes they ran. For individuals who, sooner than August 23, 1939, idea that communism used to be a promise of heaven on earth and that handiest the Nazis deserved to elicit any contempt or dangerous style within the mouth, the Hitler-Stalin pact should were a sobering slap within the face. Whilst the 2 dictatorships agreed on the way to divide the arena between them, in addition they confirmed their true colours, because it become transparent to all that the ideological variations between the Nazis and the communists have been handiest superficial. “The only seems as a savior, and underneath his gown lies the satan; the opposite disguises himself as Devil, and is in reality Devil,” wrote our Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész. Lower than every week later, Hitler and Stalin’s diabolical grip ended in Global Battle II.
We Hungarians – and, extra widely, the population of Central and Jap Europe – skilled the chilly and uncooked grip of the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships firsthand. Our sovereignty used to be taken away, our independence used to be abolished, we have been oppressed, exploited, and a device of terror in accordance with hatred and exclusion used to be presented to legitimize the regime. Totalitarian dictatorships have pitted folks in opposition to every different and performed them off in opposition to every different, making a local weather of concern, suspicion and distrust, consolidated by way of a device of informants and denouncers. Each the communists and the Nazis used violence in opposition to their perceived or actual enemies on a scale hitherto unknown, and so they each dedicated crimes on an enormous scale, the likes of that are extraordinary in historical past. “The exile from human lifestyles, the torment, the hunger, the slave exertions, the dying by way of torture, are the similar in Recsk as in Dachau, and Kolyma is not any other from Mauthausen on this admire. (…) Each the Gulag and the Nazi camp community have been created for a similar goal, and the thousands and thousands of sufferers testify to the truth that they fulfilled their goal,” Kertész wrote. The cynicism, immorality and anti-humanity of those that ran the dictatorship have been summed up easiest by way of none instead of Stalin: “Demise solves all issues, no guy, no drawback.”
After we take into account the sufferers of totalitarian dictatorships in Europe, we aren’t handiest considering of those that have been murdered as a result of their affairs of state, their ideals or their race. We should additionally depend those that have been displaced, dispossessed and in the end robbed in their long term as a result of their circle of relatives traditions, their previous, their upbringing. And we should additionally call to mind ourselves, as a result of in the end it used to be our previous, our traditions and our values that they sought to strip from us. However on at the present time, we should additionally take into account those that weren’t handiest sufferers of dictatorships, but additionally those that fought in opposition to them in deed, in phrase or by way of motion. Their braveness, their loyalty to their country, to their religion, is an instance to us all the responsibility to withstand evil. It used to be their overwhelming want for freedom that fueled the anti-communist revolution that put us again in regulate of our future.
For us Hungarians and for the ones folks in Central Europe who raise with us the average historic heritage of the twentieth century, it will increase the probabilities of working out and a way of belonging amongst us. It’s exactly as a result of this trauma that we’re extra working out of the struggling of folks, as a result of we see in it our personal ache, anxiousness and loss. Alternatively, all of this additionally comes with an enormous accountability as of late in a Europe whose Western part does now not know the cost and that means of freedom, does now not know the actual face of dictatorships, does now not price their nationwide heritage and identification, and does now not price the significance of circle of relatives and faith.
We, who possess this invaluable heritage, should take Arthur Koestler’s recommendation and lightweight the “candles of reality” to cross on our wisdom.
Rajmund Fekete, PhD, is a historian and Director of the Institute for the Analysis of Communism. This newsletter gave the impression in Hungarian within the August 23, 2023 version of Magyar Nemzet. The thing has been re-published right here with the writer’s permission.